Oxford Humanities Archive

This just post to H-Asia:

H-ASIA
July 12, 2005

Launching of commercial Oxford Journals Humanities Archive
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posts to modify information from specific offers of sale to general
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Contact Oxford Journals for further information. FFC

From: H-Net Announcements

Oxford Journals launch Humanities Archive
Date Submitted: 2005-07-01
Announcement ID: 146909

Today Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, announced the launch of its Humanities Archive: the first of five subject-based digital backfiles to be launched by early 2006. With its earliest material dating from 1829, the Humanities Archive contains over 300,000 articles, including major papers in history, music, religion, philosophy, literary studies, and linguistics, from Volume 1 Issue 1 of each title to the end of 1995. Journals included in the
project include Essays in Criticism, English Historical Review, Past & Present, and the Journal of Theological Studies.

The project forms part of Oxford Journals' strategy to increase and improve access to scholarly information, by ensuring permanent electronic accessibility to journal content.

‘With electronic information now commonplace, readers increasingly expect to find all journal content online, whether it is today’s cutting-edge research or concepts from the more distant past. This massive digitization process addresses this growing need for older content’, said Richard Gedye, Sales and Marketing Director, Oxford Journals. He continued: ‘Our aim is two-fold: to increase the availability of important knowledge that was once previously hard to access and in danger of becoming lost; and to connect far more quickly with the people who need to read it.’

The Humanities Archive is available for purchase or on subscription from July 1, 2005.
Four further subject-based archives in Law, Medicine, Science, and Social Science will be released over the coming months. The Complete Archive, which includes all 141 journals in the subject-based Archives (with no duplication of content), and an estimated four million article pages, is anticipated to be available from January 2006. Fully-searchable article PDFs with HTML headers and abstracts, and links to similar articles in each journal are just two of the features of the collection that will make it an indispensable resource for researchers, enabling quick and easy access to both current and previously hard-to-find material. For librarians and information managers, these digital backfiles will serve to fill gaps in institutional collections, while saving valuable shelf space and staff time.

Each Archive will be available for outright purchase (either for local loading or via remote access from the Oxford Journals server) or on annual subscription. Each Archive contains material published up to December 1995. Accordingly, from 2006, a current subscription to any journal in the Archive project will include access to the full text of all volumes back to January 1996. For the majority of journals this will mean that current subscribers will gain access to at least one additional year of full-text content, since most of our journals were launched online subsequently to 1996.